Invest in the children, invest in the future

(The following is an update from a blogger on the One Nation Working Together California “Blog Mobile,” an RV full of bloggers driving from Los Angeles to Washington, DC –  chronicling the stories of working Americans they meet along the way. The trip is sponsored in part by SEIU United Long Term Care Workers. For more, visit: OneNationCa.org)

New Mexico State Senator and New Mexico Voices for Children Executive Director Eric Griego lays out some hard facts concerning child poverty in New Mexico.

There are 3,746 homeless children in New Mexico under 6 years old.  New Mexico ranks 47th in the National Center on Family Homelessness nationwide report on child homelessness.   Substance and domestic abuse is epidemic.  And according to Eric Griego, it’s not getting any better. Griego, a New Mexico State Senator, is also the Executive Director of New Mexico Voices of Children, whose mission is “to eliminate child poverty and improve the health and well–being of New Mexico’s children, families and communities.” We had the chance to sit down with him today and hear his thoughts on the scary situation New Mexico finds itself in.

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Griego spoke with an urgency that, we learned later, was born of an intimate connection with his home state’s early childhood care infrastructure. As he told us, he doesn’t need to be convinced that the system can work – he’s living proof.  Griego spent his childhood in the Head Start programs and community centers, and has seen first hand the immense good that such support can do for a child growing up.  Now he’s made it his life’s work to make sure that no one child ever need grow up in poverty or be denied an education.

The recession has made things even tougher for Utah, which is not a rich state by any measure.

“The government thinks that we can cut our way out of this depression,” he lamented to us, and cut they have.  Cutbacks have affected many of the programs Griego cites as essential to the health of the State.  Early childhood programs, family support programs, domestic abuse programs and substance abuse programs have all seen cuts.  But without support for these programs, New Mexico faces a future with the absence of a talented, educated, motivated and healthy workforce.

In describing the potentially disastrous consequences of neglecting early childhood education and family support, Griego was visibly saddened.  Yet it was clear he remains hopeful that change can and will come around, and that the federal government will come to aid of states like New Mexico which truly require its aid.

“This is the United States of America,” he reminded us, “and if we’re not united, then we’re not anything.”

He acknowledges that New Mexico cannot expect another state to bail out its educational system, but the federal government needs to realize quickly that it can and should take a strong role in revitalizing the social aid programs of ailing states.

Most importantly, the focus needs to be shifted back to the very programs that are suffering the most.  A well-developed, well-funded infrastructure for early childhood and family support gives children the opportunity not just survive, but get a great education and succeed.  Those children go on to be the talented workforce that New Mexico will need, and they become the greatest economic stimulus a state could ever ask for: invest in the children, and you invest in the future.